# Figurative Archive: an open dataset and web-based application for the study of metaphor

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.00444 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00444/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 112 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [ChatGPT Outperforms Crowd-Workers for Text-Annotation Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15056/) (2023)
- [Learning Word Vectors for 157 Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.06893/) (2018)
- [Prompting Large Language Models for Topic Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09693/) (2023)
- [Large Language Model Displays Emergent Ability to Interpret Novel Literary Metaphors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01497/) (2023)
- [Predicting Concreteness and Imageability of Words Within and Across Languages via Word Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.02903/) (2018)
- [Determination of the Number of Topics Intrinsically: Is It Possible?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10402/) (2024)
- [Computational analyses of the topics, sentiments, literariness, creativity and beauty of texts in a large Corpus of English Literature](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.04356/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Large Language Models for Subjective Language Understanding: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.07959/) (2025)
- [Metaphors' journeys across time and genre: tracking the evolution of literary metaphors with temporal embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.13701/) (2026)
- [MetaClimage: A novel database of visual metaphors related to Climate Change, with costs and benefits analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09225/) (2025)
- [Can GPT replace human raters? Validity and reliability of machine-generated norms for metaphors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.12444/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Research on metaphor has steadily increased over the last decades, as this phenomenon opens a window into a range of linguistic and cognitive processes. At the same time, the demand for rigorously constructed and extensively normed experimental materials increased as well. Here, we present the Figurative Archive, an open database of 996 metaphors in Italian enriched with rating and corpus-based measures (from familiarity to semantic distance and preferred interpretations), derived by collecting stimuli used across 11 studies. It includes both everyday and literary metaphors, varying in structure and semantic domains, and is validated based on correlations between familiarity and other measures. The Archive has several aspects of novelty: it is increased in size compared to previous resources; it offers a measure of metaphor inclusiveness, to comply with recommendations for non-discriminatory language use; it is displayed in a web-based interface, with features for a customized consultation. We provide guidelines for using the Archive to source materials for studies investigating metaphor processing and relationships between metaphor features in humans and computational models.